This May marks three years since I graduated college, but boy does it feel like a lifetime. In some ways, these three years have been a blur of wedding planning, learning to work full-time, and doing all those “grownup” things nobody warns you about. I’ve gotten married, traveled to Europe, taught in several different schools, and done a whirlwind of things since I graduated three years ago.
But in other ways, these last few years have been incredibly slow. I’ve wrestled with deep questions of who I am, where my value and identity come from, and what it looks like to find fullness and joy in a grownup world that often just feels routine. That struggle led me to counseling last year, and every day is another battle to choose joy in a world that invites me to choose sadness, cynicism, and hopelessness.
As I see all of your cap and gown pictures in my newsfeed, I remember how surreal that day was for me. I think I expected to feel different, to feel like I was somehow the more grownup, “educated” version of myself, but I still just felt like me. More than the hours of sitting on a sweaty lawn chair listening to way too many names, the moments that stand out to me from that season the most are the slow goodbyes over those few weeks in May.
